About Me
I learned HTML when the spec came out. (We were all doing that. We thought it was fun. Yes, we were incredibly geeky.) Living just over the hill from Silicon Valley, and having experience building sites and pages by hand with HTML and then with CSS, I was in the perfect place to take contracts with companies who needed sites built and maintained.
Starting with my first fulltime job after college, I wrote procedures - first for the tasks I was performing, then for jobs that others would be doing. I added style guides, how-tos, and project flows to my repertoire. Soon I was authoring competitive analyses, project specs, and more.
The roles I've enjoyed most have let me work on a broad-ranging project or application: for example, working with stakeholders to plan and execute their content updates and then implementing them, rather than only focusing on publishing; or writing multiple procedures for an entire process rather than just smaller, more isolated documents. I feel that I can do my best work when I look at the entire context of a job and know how my piece - whether large or smaller, whether simpler or more complex - fits in with the whole.
Pet peeves include poor usability, long commutes, decaf coffee, and missing hardware pieces in flat-pack furniture kits.
About The Site
I've installed and used many CMSes - my preferred favorites are ExpressionEngine and Craft - but for this site I chose to go old-school. For this particular project, a CMS would have worked just fine; but would also not be the best solution.
The content is authored in Notepad++, and the pages are built using using server-side includes. Since I don't plan to have dynamic elements for the site and since it will often sit unedited for months at a time, I chose a solution that would not be an inviting target for hackers. Yes, people can still bust in and deface the pages. But there's not a way for them to get access to a database; and since it's a series of flat files, hacking them is not much of a challenge to them. And if I come back to the site after a few months of not looking at it to find defaced pages, a quick FTP session will put everything back to rights.
